Page 3 of The Starfish Sisters

I nodded.

“You just moved here with the preacher, right?”

Another nod.

“My name is Beryl Axford. I live in the house with the purple door down at the end of the road. You need anything, you come find me.” She smiled. “I have a granddaughter your age. She’ll be here in a couple of weeks. Maybe you’ll be friends.”

“Thank you.”

“You have money to pay?”

“Yeah.”

She patted my shoulder and left me.

Now, on a rainy day decades later, I press my forehead against the cold glass. Headaches have been my constant companion since the attack. The cold eases this one a little. I long for the studio space where Phoebe is moving around. It seems like I might be able to breathe there.

Across the span of dunes, Phoebe stands by the window of the studio in her red sweater, drinking coffee. I’m wearing a thick white sweater myself. It’s cold and drizzly, the sea a restless dark gray. I watch for a long time, hoping Phoebe will send me a sign, but she never looks up.

Eventually, I move away from the window, into the kitchen. It’s a Frank Lloyd Wright house, at least nominally, built by one of his assistants from plans FLW drew, and it is as extraordinary as that implies, with built-ins and acres of wood and glass meant to frame the views. When I bought it, it had been abandoned since the ’60s, was rumored to be haunted, and was in danger of being torn down by the city. It had needed a lot of rehab—a long, expensive task—but I loved it madly. More to the point at the moment, I feel safe here, sequestered away from the world on the Oregon coast. It’s my refuge.

I’m no purist, not like Phoebe would have been. She wouldn’t have hung the paintings and drawings and photos of sea stars and anemones that I’ve been collecting all these years; instead she would have kept to the spirit of the house in some totally appropriate way. Idon’t even know what I mean by that, exactly. Maxfield Parrish prints? Architectural drawings?

But I love my choices. A watercolor of a tide pool hangs beside the window with fat pink and orange sea stars clinging to the rocks. The colors are soft, the lines easy, blurry, much like many others I’ve picked up at art shows here and there. I don’t invest in art so much as collect the things I love, and in the process support struggling artists. Acting is not the easiest life, but it beats dragging around to parks and fairgrounds all spring and summer, hawking your wares.

Or maybe that’s not fair. Maybe it just sounds like torture to me. For all the fame my work has brought, I don’t love talking to strangers. My upbringing was so weird that I’m always sure I’m getting something wrong. It makes me reticent, if not exactly shy.

Which then is interpreted as my being stuck-up.

The drizzle is easing. A shimmer of light breaks through the clouds and fingers the tiny forest atop the trio of sea stacks called Starfish Sisters. I think of swimming between them as a girl, Phoebe diving to find treasures of all kinds and bring them up to show me, since I would not touch them with my own hands, then diving to put them back.

From the table I look down at the studio, but I can’t see her now. The weight of things I need to tell her fills my gut with a mix of apprehension. I’ve kept so many secrets I should never have kept, and when I was lying in that hospital room after the beating, wondering if I might really die, I knew I had to confess them.

But how? How can I tell her the truth after decades of being silent?

This was alwaysherhouse. She was the one who found it and dragged me back up the bluff to see it, standing empty and ghostly with the dusty furniture still in place and all the dishes, beautiful pieces made of pale-green glass. I didn’t know then that they were Depression glass, but I do now, and I still have some of them. Back in the day Phoebe found a way in through a window in the back, and we took picnic lunches to eat on the vast, multilayered decks. We played houseby the flagstone fireplace and imagined the guests we would host in the beautiful space. Here we envisioned the lives we wanted to build for ourselves, Phoebe a famous artist, me a famous actress.

I tuck my cardigan closer around me, feeling a pang.

The things you don’t know when you’re young could break you into a million pieces if you let them.

On the beach, birds are gathering meals, chattering to each other. I suddenly long for fresh air. An easy walk will do me some good, and while I was having trouble leaving the house in LA, here I can see for miles in either direction. No one can sneak up on me. No one even knows I’m here.

I take the stairs down to the beach and find I can take a deep breath for the first time in months. A couple with a dog walks far ahead in the distance, but mostly it’s me and the birds. Phoebe could tell you every one of their names, taught by her grandmother, a great naturalist. I know seagulls and murres and some of the biggest prey birds, like eagles, but not all of them.

But I don’t need to know their names to admire them. The gulls shine white in the patches of sunlight, bright against the muted blue water of the creek flowing out of the mountains. They ride the current down toward the sea, grooming their feathers and squawking, splashing in pleasure, then fly up and start over, like children going down a slide.

It gives me peace. My headache, almost constant since the attack, eases slightly. I breathe in the salt air.

I met Phoebe on this very beach. Early summer, right after my dad took over the church. The day was overcast, threatening rain, too cold for the Portland tourists who mobbed the place on summer weekends.

Phoebe was a scrawny girl, so skinny you could see the individual bones of her knees. Her dark hair was scraped back into a knot on the top of her head that dripped pieces of hair down her freckled face. Alot of freckles, actually—freckles across her nose and sprinkled down her arms and over her chest.

But all I cared about was that she looked like she was my age. She was the only person on the beach, bent over a tide pool, peering. “Hi,” I said.

She looked up. “Hi.”

“What’s your name?” I asked.